How green a website is depends a lot on how it's been created. If you run your own website, it's up to you to implement methods to reduce its carbon footprint. Luckily, making your website eco-friendly is not always that difficult. In this article, we will present 5 methods which you easily deploy to make your website more eco-friendly.

1. Choose a website host that uses renewable energy
The most substantial thing you can do is host your website with a provider that uses renewable energy. Your website is stored on a variety of servers around the world. When a user connects to your website, they are effectively connecting to one of these servers to access your content.

The problem? Servers are very power hungry. They need to run on electricity 24 hours a day so that your website is accessible at any time of the day. Servers also produce a lot of heat naturally - so they need to be cooled which often uses devices that require a lot of electricity.

Switching to a green host is one of the finest ways to make your website more eco friendly. Doing this means that the power required to provide your website to users is completely renewable from your side. The carbon footprint will then be vastly reduced.

2. Offset any emissions
One issue is that finding a fully green host can be difficult. Although renewable energy is now being rolled out more and more around the world, there is a bottleneck to how fast it can be up and running.
So you may want to invest in carbon offsetting. This is where you invest in projects that aim to reduce or remove other carbon emission sources.

There are even dedicated schemes for offsetting website emissions. For example, the online gambling comparison site Gamblermaster.com has invested in the CO2 neutral initative. This initiative works out the website's carbon footprint based on the number of visitors each year. They then invest in projects to offset this footprint. Each website even gets its own certificate (here is Gamblermaster's) which proves they've offset their carbon emissions.

3. Use simple themes
But there are plenty of things you can do personally when designing or upgrading your website. One of them is to think carefully about what theme you use. High-resolution themes may seem entertaining and attractive - but they can add significantly to the data required to load your site. This requires more energy to do.

So, instead of heavy themes, consider lighter themes on your website. This not only benefits the environment but can also enhance the user experience as heavy themes may slow down page loading times.
Of course, if your theme has something unique that provides too much value then you may not be able to get rid of it. So you can look to move on to other eco-friendly website tricks.

4. Deploy lazy loading
The term lazy loading refers to the process of only loading images and other media when necessary. When a user lands on your webpage, everything above the fold (everything that can be seen on screen) loads immediately. But with lazy loading, the remainder doesn't appear until or unless the user actually scrolls down to view more content. If the user doesn't scroll down then the remaining images and other media are not served unnecessarily. This saves a variety of resources.

5. Compress images/videos
There's no doubt that images and other media enhance a webpage considerably. They require more data to load than text - but no one wants to browse an internet without multimedia. However, you should choose what to include carefully. Does the image or video you want to include add much value? If not, you can consider leaving anything unnecessary out. And any media that you do include, you can compress. This reduces the size of the file which requires less resources to load.

Compressing images is easy. Most photos on the web do not need to be ultra-high resolution to view. Also, with mobile phones now being the most preferred way to browse the web, images no longer need to have huge dimensions. This makes it much simpler to compress photos. A good tool you can use is Tinypng.com. You simply upload your images to this site which automatically reduces the file size - with no noticeable difference in the image's quality.

Compressing videos can be more difficult. Users expect videos to be in at least high-definition (HD) quality these days so they can properly view and enjoy the content. This requires the file size to be higher than standard definition. Even so, your video editing software may give you the option to reduce the file size when exporting. You can experiment with the different settings here to try and find a good balance between video quality and file size.